Calendar

In which Shingo opines on the disastrous release delays of futanari games, notes some other February titles of interest, takes a look at what’s in the release pipeline for the next few months, and indulges in some shameless self-promotion.

Release Delays

Ahh, the best laid plans of mice and men… of the four games I was anticipating for release in February in this update, two have been bumped back to March:

Resort Boin has been moved to a March 16th release, quality up no tame

Narimono was shunted back a week to March 2nd due to the discovery of an “inappropriate line” in the game text

Why is it only the futanari games that this happens to? We covered the untimely retraction on similar grounds of Deepblue Soft’s Futari just days before release in April of 2005, which led to the game being cancelled entirely and the ultimate disappearance of the company.

In an industry where the critical failure of just one title can mean financial ruin, it’s up to us fans to support companies that take risks with niche themes like futanari. That said, there’s not much we can do when they keep shooting themselves in the foot by not letting their products go to market – get with the program, people.

The main translation has arrived, and we’re now working to convert menus and other design elements before pulling the whole thing together for some serious beta-testing. While my contract stipulates that I can’t give away many details in this regard (the penalty was something along the lines of subjugation to Unit 731) I’d say a release before early summer is a very realistic prospect.

Why You Should Buy This Game:

I’ve played through an early draft of the translation, and it’s really well done. The game’s genre is described on the official site as “downer-type”, but it’s not going to make you jump off a bridge – if I were to describe it more accurately it’s more of a jaded, postmodern tender romance in a realistic pastel fairyland dystopia. Something like that. There’s a reason the game is subtitled “drug – bullying – interpersonal relationship”, and if you like helping girls with problems this is the game for you.

The art is great. It’s by Haimura Kiyotaka. If you have eyes you can form your own opinion on this, of course.

Japanese people like this game. It has a whole bunch of reviews, many of them good. This means you will like it too, if you are a Japanese person with DNA made out of statistical averages! Also, apparently the script writer Tanaka Romeo has a rather cultish following. This is a good thing.

In sum, if applied moetics interests you and you like heartful stories that may or may not make you cry, you should probably check out Yume Miru Kusuri.

In the interest of being fair and balanced, it seems that some other company has licensed and released Bible Black in English. You can buy it if you want!

That linkage to Unit 731 suddenly gave me the chills… hope you don’t get caught. -_-

And your pimpage of Yume Miru Kusuri was enough to entice me on getting it. I had my doubts, as some of the other English company-translated works weren’t that good. I’m expecting something to the likes of Tenshi no Inai 12Gatsu though.

I will wait the releases for march. There’s two japanese games i’m interested into:

RURUR from Light, a Sci-Fi romance/Comedy about a spaceship with a tripulation of bad-french-speaking female androids and robots who found a young human male, the sole survivor of all the human race in space, and CHU-CHU from Unisonshift, a Supernatural romance/comedy game about a boy who found a crazy vampire-girl. She wants to find her mother so she decided to became an iddol-singer, using you and your best friend for that.

As for the english releases, there’s two new future releases from the reborned G-Collections: BAZOOKA CAFE, a big-breasts sexy romance/comedy dating-sim about a Cafeteria filled with big-breasted maids, and PRETTY SOLDIER WARS A.D.2048, a Sci-Fi Action-RPG game about a team of beatiful cyborg-girls fighting tentacle-monsters.

I don’t want to oversell Yume Miru Kusuri, but all signs point to it being a worthy purchase as of this point in development. I’ll be working hard to keep to that standard as things move forward with it.

>>BigGilis
You’ve probably noticed that my taste in titles tends toward the bb romantic comedies and the darker lust/sex titles, and so while I agree that RURUR and CHU-CHU do look interesting (I do like Light and Unisonshift as brands, aesthetically speaking) they’re probably not going to earn my scanty purchasing yens. :/

Regarding those other English releases: don’t tell anyone, but I’m working on them too. I didn’t bring them up here as they’re still a bit further down the production pipeline, but you can be sure more will be showing up here about them soon.

>>loplop
Hitozuma Dorei Keikaku is Zundarepon, which makes it a kneejerk purchase in my book – he’s one artist I feel like I automatically have to support whenever he puts something out.